Wired Magazine last week reported on a California physicist who, facing a stiff penalty for running a stop sign, fought the ticket and won. However, Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist based at the University of California in San Diego, went way beyond the usual strategy of "hope the police officer who issued the citation doesn't show up to court."

Krioukov wrote and has since published a rigorous mathematical paper on his traffic stop, to which he gave the Edith Wharton-esque title "The Proof of Innocence." Packed full of equations and graphs, the paper demonstrates that the officer's perception was skewed by three coinciding phenomena, resulting in the inaccurate conclusion that Krioukov had not made a complete stop.

As Wired explains:

Krioukov’s argument is based upon the premise that three coincidences happened at the same time to make the police officer believe that he had seen the physicist run a red light, when, in fact, he hadn’t. He writes: “[In this paper], we show that if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer, e.g., a police officer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satisfied: (1) The observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) The car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) There is a short-time obstruction of the observer’s view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign.”

Additionally, the physicist says he sneezed at the intersection, which caused him to brake harder than usual. He received a $400 prize for his paper, which is what his ticket would have cost.

Physics Central suggests that Krioukov won because either the paper's argument was airtight or the judge was so impressed with the thoroughness of his effort. In any case, if you wish to fight a ticket on the basis that the officer's perception of reality was skewed, you have your precedent.